PlodWare – PC applications

I started writing my own “Forth” like language system back in 1988. Originally I wrote in Motorola 68000 assembler on an Atari ST+, but when I was given access to a VMS 11/720 (I think) at my work, I wrote a version in Pascal.

After a while I had a Sun Solaris workstation, so I wrote a “Forth” (with the ability to create GUI components using a Motif library) in Sparc assembler (mind blowing!).

Then sometime around early 1999 I bought a Windows 98 based PC, and decided to create a “Forth” like interpreter in “C” using the Win32 API. That meant that I had to manage the GUI components myself.

Over the years that version has grown and grown. It now supports an embedded SQL database (courtesy of the SQLite people), lots of GUI widgets, drag and drop, and…

Some of the things that I developed using the “Forth” interpreter have now been encoded (so no-one can change them) and embedded into a specially prepared version of the “Forth” interpreter. Thus I can create stand alone applications based on my “Forth” scripts.

I have decide to make some of the standalone applications available under the title “PlodWare”. Why “PlodWare”, well as you can see from the above text, I have been plodding away at “Forth” for a long time!

I often refer to myself as a “happy hacker”, in the sense that I hack away at my programming goals. But it is probably politically “incorrect” to refer to oneself with the word “hacker”.